A year of mob programming, part 3: a laboratory for team dynamics

Our implementation of mob programming consists in a permanent Google Meet videocall, with camera on, in which we rotate a developer sharing a screen containing IDE and browser. So there are two unusual practices to get used to: being in a group all the time, and being on a camera all the time.

I was originally surprised on how both practices went from exhausting to being a normal work day. This is my experience, and we have to consider neurodiversity and personal preferences in the team on having a long screen time and continuous social interaction. It's almost obvious to say, but sometimes people hate inconclusive meetings in which they have no say; not being together with other human beings.

Don't underestimate your capacity to adapt, but recognize that your energy is not going to always be the same; whether because you got a cold, or something is going on at home, or some task is particularly draining. 

The Flemish inscription at bottom reads: because feedback is perfidious, I will go code in my cave

Gold cards and spike branches give people the ability to work on their own when they request to. Mechanical work such as upgrade of dependencies or investigating logs can benefit from focused time from one person. If you were in an office, you could go to an isolated room; working remotely, it's even easier as it just consists in leaving the video call and coming back refreshed later.

The opposite can also happen, when someone like me can manifest Fear Of Missing Out and the mob making lots of decisions in their absence. As the team gets to a norming phase, we should expect fewer surprises for members coming back to the mob after some time off.

Being together with the rest of the team can make your motivation higher due to the group support in getting started or unstuck from a particular problem; but of course the whole group can struggle on occasion.

Every time there is a new composition, though, there are changes in how the mob is working and what it pays more attention to. And from the point of view of a growing team leader, being embedded in a mob environment means being positively inundated with information. The challenge is to make sense of what we see to understand where team members are struggling and what are they finding most effective.

"I wish I could see players only in 121 meetings" -- No football coach ever

This requires a lot of (cognitive) bandwidth, and I usually can't at the same time focus on technical architecture and on social roles. But maybe this is just an argument to work in a team where the different hats can be rotated; as much as there is always someone writing code, there can always be someone checking if we have started to talk over each other, or we are falling into a rabbit hole of an hour without committing.

Stay tuned for the next part of this post, The remoteness of it.

Images by Michael Kranewitter and in the public domain.